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Why anyone thought this was a good idea was Aizawa’s best guess. Who thought this was a good idea, he didn’t have to guess: it was Nedzu, of course, because Nedzu was an agent of chaos and an inexhaustible source of problems.
Nedzu, and the British TV network Channel 4.
Here, for the curious, was a short list of things Aizawa knew for fact:
1. He was exhausted, perpetually, and there had been a time not long ago in which he was exhausted merely often and not as a constant.
2. The source of the exhaustion he was now riddled with was a group of hellions over which Aizawa had been forced to preside as home room teacher for three years now, and of which he had unfortunately grown fond.
3. The last place any of said hellions should be is inside a tent, baking. Except Satou. Satou could stay.
What had happened was Nedzu and Channel 4, who had now landed themselves on Aizawa’s short but precise list of most hated organizations, had decided to have a collaboration event, in which Aizawa, the overenthusiastic Yamada Hizashi, and the aforementioned class of 20 hellions were stuck in the tent of The Great British Bake Off to fend for themselves.
Japan in general was going crazy over the idea. Vlad was throwing a fit over his class not being invited, and for once Aizawa agreed with him. In fact, Aizawa wished he’d retired three years ago.
The problem was not, of course, that the idea wasn’t good. It was good marketing, and it was fun, which was something the kids had been missing for a while.
The problem was that, as Aizawa had discovered after a particularly paperwork-laden visit from the fire department to the student dorms, not a single member of Class A, excepting Satou, should be allowed free reign of a kitchen, supervised or not. They should, in fact, be kept from the kitchen at all costs, as a measure of public safety.
Aizawa could only be grateful that the recurring cast of The Great British Bake Off, including Paul and Prue, had declined to join them. The class got the set and the challenges but not the people. Aizawa didn’t know who to thank for this, but they deserved his gratitude a hundred times over for having that amount of common sense.
In their place, Present Mic was judging, which was fair because Mic was honestly a fantastic cook and baker and had the taste and the impartiality for it. And Aizawa was playing the role of making sure his kids didn’t blow anything up and cost UA millions of dollars, which was turning out to be a much, much more difficult task than it sounded on the surface.
“This seems ambitious!” Yamada said as Aoyama demonstrated his plan for the signature challenge. It involved macarons and madeleines. The challenge only called for them to make one type of cookie, and this seemed like a disaster in the making.
Yamada greeted this overachievement enthusiastically, but Aizawa could tell he was having doubts about it. Aizawa, even knowing next to nothing about baking, was having his own doubts about it.
“I have planned my time,” Aoyama assured them. “It is feasible.”
Yamada cast Aizawa an uncertain look. Aizawa shrugged. It was the kid’s time. If he said he could do it, then he’d try to do it. A learning experience either way.
“Have you made anything like this before?” Yamada asked, trying to pull them back on track.
“Non,” Aoyama said.
Aizawa bit back a sigh and turned away.
He should have known, probably, that Iida would not be good at baking, but it hadn’t really occurred to him until he was standing and watching Iida agonize over the scale, trying to get the flour down to the perfect amount of grams. He kept adding just a tiny bit too much or a tiny bit too little, and the balance wasn’t quite right.
Aizawa was far from an expert, but he thought it didn’t matter if the weight was right down to the milligram, particularly for flour. To Iida, though, it mattered a lot.
Aizawa watched a moment of small triumph from Iida, a little fist pump as the flour finally hit the precise amount, and then, almost immediately, he watched Tokoyami’s dough explode out of the mixer all over himself, Dark Shadow, and Iida’s back.
He pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. It was going to be a long, long, long day. Very long.
“What….” Aizawa stared past Todoroki at the smoldering mess of…something…on his table. “What….”
He actually didn’t have the words to follow that.
“I don’t know,” Todoroki said, with such seriousness that Aizawa couldn’t help but believe that Todoroki had genuinely no idea what had gone wrong along the way to cause this disaster.
“You’re supposed to be making cookies,” Aizawa said, trying to maintain his usual uncaring poise and failing horribly. He sounded horror-struck, and he was. He’d specifically asked for the recipes the kids would have to make to be easy. Cookies were the easiest thing to bake. Aizawa himself could bake cookies, and Aizawa had been told repeatedly by Yamada that he was the last person who should be allowed inside a kitchen.
“I am,” Todoroki said, gesturing at the smoking pile of inedibility behind him.
“No,” Aizawa said, “you are not.”
He was distracted from this fresh hell by Sero, who before today he’d thought might actually be decent in the kitchen. He had been wrong. He had been so wrong.
“They’re not cooking,” Sero said, with so much defeat and sadness in his voice that for a moment Aizawa thought he was about to cry on television, and he started scrambling for a way to get the cameras away, because goddamnit he was not letting any of his kids get their sobbing face plastered all over the media. “They’re still raw.”
Luckily for Aizawa, he didn’t have to jump to extremes, because Jirou leaned over her table behind them and said, “Um, Sero, I think you didn’t turn on the oven.”
“Of course I turned on the…” Sero stopped. He looked for a long time at his oven which, sure enough, was not on. “Am I…. Am I stupid?”
“No,” Jirou said, once again coming to Aizawa’s rescue.
Aizawa retreated as Sero retrieved his cookies and turned his oven on.
He contemplated just sitting in the back and tuning the rest of this out. He was actually strongly considering it, leaning toward letting his terrible students sort this out for themselves and dealing with the fallout himself later, when Bakugou started screaming at Midoriya, and Midoriya, predictably, rose to the challenge and snapped back.
The screaming was because Midoriya had, at Aizawa’s own instructions, been placed a good distance away from Bakugou, since those two were so competitive it was best if they weren’t thinking about each other during any sort of challenge. And the cause of the wrath in the first place was…unclear.
“They aren’t spicy!” Midoriya was protesting when Aizawa came over. He was covered, somehow, in flour, so much flour that Aizawa thought there might be more on him than in the actual cookies, which were supposed to be pistachio.
“Of course they’re fucking spicy,” Bakugou said, storming over with a bottle of some spice in his hand. “Do you see what this is?”
Midoriya sent Aizawa a helpless look, and Aizawa, who had watched these two fight over nothing before and had learned it was best, sometimes, to just let them go at it until the argument fizzled, said nothing.
“This is cayenne pepper,” Bakugou told him, thrusting the label in Midoriya’s face. Midoriya, to his credit, didn’t flinch back. Aizawa had to admit they’d grown.
“I know what’s in them,” Midoriya said. “They’re still not spicy. I’m not saying they’re bad, but—Kacchan!”
Bakugou was already storming off again, muttering about how he was going to “show him spicy.” Aizawa got a foreboding feeling and sent a desperate look to Yamada, who missed it completely as he was crooning over Satou’s already beautiful, perfectly baked cookies, which were now in the process of getting intricate decorations.
Aizawa wasn’t supposed to pick favorites but he had one right now. He definitely had one.
“Are they spicy?” Aizawa asked Midoriya.
“No,” Midoriya said, stubborn. “At best, they’re warm.”
Bakugou made a very loud scoffing sound to be heard all the way across the room. Aizawa, who had taught these kids for longer than his sanity should reasonably allow, knew that Midoriya had a high tolerance for spice, likely from being exposed to the Bakugous’ cooking from a young age.
He hurried to warn Yamada.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” Shinsou asked him, completely calm. Shinsou had put in the least possible effort on this and had made shortbread with three ingredients. He’d been done for a while now and was sitting and watching everyone else, vaguely amused.
Aizawa had retreated to his table after Kaminari nearly started an electrical fire with a fork. For someone who’s quirk was entirely based in electricity, he was lacking a certain amount of knowledge of how conductors work, and Aizawa couldn’t handle the lurking crisis of his own skill as a teacher if Kaminari was starting electrical fires with forks at eighteen years old, so he was instead hiding with Shinsou.
But if anyone asked, he was checking in on his student.
“Yep,” Aizawa said.
Shinsou turned to look at him, and then snorted. “Sure. Cookie?” He offered one of his misshapen, weirdly flat shortbread cookies.
With his remaining dignity, Aizawa said, “No thank you.”
“Good choice.”
Across the room, Uraraka shrieked in despair.
Aizawa stared down the clock. Five minutes. Five minutes left, and then they were done with this. Sure, it was only the first challenge. Sure, they had the technical challenge and the showstopper still to go. None of that mattered, because the second this challenge ended, Aizawa was retiring, changing his name, and moving to a distant country where none of these people would ever find him again.
He was staring at the clock to avoid watching Yaoyorozu, who had taken it upon herself to turn the task into an opportunity to build a feat of engineering out of cookies. Last he’d looked over, she was attempting to recreate the Tokyo Tower with gingerbread.
Aizawa physically could not watch her. He kept imagining a piece slipping, the entire thing crumbling to pieces, the ensuing distress. Half the class had stopped what they were doing and were just staring at her, holding their breath, as she carefully slipped the pieces together. Bakugou had begun giving her tips, maybe not in the most polite tone. Aizawa was resolutely not handling that either.
“This is the most stressful experience of my entire life,” Kirishima said.
Aizawa did not point out the many, many stressful experiences this class had endured prior to this, mostly because, though he would never admit it out loud, this was one of the more stressful experiences of his life as well. And he’d lived a lot longer and endured a lot more.
“Oh my god it’s tipping,” said Ashido.
“Don’t say that,” Yaoyorozu said, voice high with nerves. “Don’t say that.”
“To the right,” Shouji said.
“Shit!” Yaoyorozu said. Then: “Sorry, sorry, sorry—”
It was the first time Aizawa had ever heard her swear. He also suspected it would be the last.
Three minutes. Three minutes, then retirement.
“Yes!” Ojirou cheered. “That’s it!”
“Oh my goodness,” Yaoyorozu said, relief clear in her tone. Aizawa chanced a look back at her creation. Tokyo Tower was standing. Yaoyorozu was half slumped over Koda’s table. “Oh my goodness.”
“Good job!” Hagakure cheered. And then immediately, “Oh no…. Mine are burnt…”
“Join the club,” Ojirou said miserably.
Two minutes.
Aoyama was having a crisis over not finishing either type of cookie across the room.
One minute.
Todoroki had managed to light his entire station on fire.
Freedom.
“This is good,” Mic said, audibly around a mouthful of cookie. “Wow, this is really good.”
Aizawa raised his head from his hands to see who had received such praise. The last three had been so bad Mic had needed to ask for a glass of water. He expected Satou. He was surprised to see Asui, but not shocked.
“Thank you,” she said. “I make it for my siblings sometimes, ribbit.”
“It’s really good,” Mic said again. He turned to Aizawa and gestured at him with a cookie. “You should try one of these.”
“No,” Aizawa said.
Mic went back to gushing about Asui’s cooking, so much so she turned a little pink. She thanked him and went back to her table.
Bakugou was next. Aizawa couldn’t help but watch this one, with the same sort of fascination that one watches an egg shatter on the floor. Yamada took a bite of the cookie.
It took a second to hit. When it did, Yamada dove for the water.
Bakugou turned around and yelled at Midoriya, “I told you they were spicy.”
Midoriya had the good grace to look more concerned for Yamada than cowed by this. “You poisoned Present Mic!” he said in horror.
“No,” Yamada gasped. “No, I’m good. Um. I’m good. Milk?”
Whoever was running the show must have realized Satou had real skill, because they sent him up very last. It was a relief, after the burnt, crispy ashes of Todoroki, the somehow watery mess of Uraraka, the beautiful but disgusting tower of Yaoryorozu.
He had made delicate, flower shaped mosaic cookies. Aizawa found himself leaning forward to watch Yamada examine them. “The design on this is really impressive,” Yamada said. “I wish my tastebuds hadn’t been burned off earlier.”
Bakugou scoffed loudly.
Yamada still took a bite, and evidently he could still taste a little because he immediately started waxing poetic about the cookie.
And so it was done. Satou went back to his seat. Aizawa thought about his bed at the hotel longingly. About the retirement papers he was going to get together the moment he got there.
“And now!” Yamada said, clapping his hands together. “On to the technical!”
Horror punched Aizawa in the stomach. Sometime in the last ten minutes, he’d forgotten about the technical.
“Um, actually,” some guy from Channel 4 said. “This is probably enough. I think, um, I think we’re good.”
Ashido wheezed and started cracking up. Aizawa sent her a glare and she stifled her giggles with one hand, although her shoulders were still shaking.
“But there are still two more challenges?” Yamada said, confused.
“Your class has almost burnt down our tent,” the guy from Channel 4 said, “three times. In the span of an hour. I think this is enough.”
Aizawa had a savior and his name was Some Guy from Channel 4.
“But—”
“I think they’re saying they got the footage they need,” Aizawa said, standing.
“Yes,” Some Guy from Channel 4 said. “Yes, exactly. Please leave.”
“Everyone pack up!” Aizawa said. He had never been more thrilled with the bad behavior of his class. They got him out of this whole thing an entire day early! This was the best possible outcome. “We’re leaving.”
“I didn’t think we were that bad,” Uraraka said outside as they waited for the bus.
Several of her misguided but enthusiastic classmates agreed.
“You were absolutely terrible,” Aizawa said. “You’re all expelled.”
“Ha!” said Hagakure, and they all fell over themselves laughing at the very idea of it.
Retirement. He needed it now. He needed it yesterday.
“I thought mine were pretty good,” Todoroki said.
Bakugou immediately started yelling at him. Aizawa let this fall into background noise. He shepherded the class onto the bus when it came.
After he took his seat, he didn’t let any of the class see as he pulled out a misshapen, weirdly flat shortbread cookie. He bit into it.
It was absolutely disgusting.